Linas Phillips on Bass Ackwards, His VW Bus, and Male Bonding

From left: director Linas Phillips, actress Davie-Blue, and SIFF's Carl Spence (Photo: Victoria Holt)

Bass Ackwards (fresh from a SIFF run, and playing June 12-17 at the Northwest Film Forum) "follows a floundering hero without floundering itself," as the Hollywood Reporter puts it.

It is director Linas Phillips' first non-documentary picture (Walking to Werner, Great Speeches from a Dying World), though it documents plenty in its own way, and has some memoir in it, including footage of Phillips as a baby.

The film contrasts making plans with being guided by the immediacy and joy of living in the moment. It has a string-of-beads structure, one thing after another, loosely contained by the fact that a road trip has to start somewhere and end somewhere, at least geographically.

If you're in the mood for it, the movie can open up to you like one of the random strangers Phillips meets on his way, as he navigates his way into adulthood via what looks like a retreat toward home. "Even though I'm an actor and it's all phony, in certain ways, I wanted it to feel like it wasn't, to create that atmosphere," Phillips told me.

We were upstairs in the Harvard Exit, talking with actress and co-writer Davie-Blue, who'd respond to and clarify some of Phillips's more sweeping statements. "That's your job as an actor, to create spaces in which you can feel like you're being honest." Davie-Blue, also a theatre actress, was seen here in 2008 in the musical Medea Knows Best, and looks the part of a brunette Mad Men ingenue.

"When we started shooting in Seattle, it wasn't even clear we were going to make a whole movie," said Phillips. "We had the first 20 pages, until he gets on the road, and then we didn't have anything written." He was friendly and funny, but he'd trail off in answering questions as if he'd suddenly lost faith in the power of words to communicate and perhaps the effort of the last five minutes was totally wasted.

In the film, a couch-surfing wedding videographer (Linas) is having an affair with a married woman (Davie-Blue), but very quickly loses both his couch and her. Struggling to keep it together emotionally and financially, he takes a job at an alpaca farm (on Vashon: a terrific scene presents Phillips holding back feed from an alpaca, badgering it to say it loves him). There, he finds an escape vehicle in the form of a chopped '76 VW bus, and heads cross-country, planning to crash at his parents while he comes up with his next move.

Phillips and Davie-Blue planned out the launch pad part--"Like the whole alpaca farm, and we actually even wrote some of the dialogue scenes. I think the motel room, that was pretty improvised, though," said Phillips.

"What we said," added Davie-Blue.

"I mean, we must have written something."

"We didn't use what we wrote. Or...at least we knew we were going to play Go Fish."

"Right. And I was gonna say, 'I love you,' and stuff like that," concluded Phillips.

Which I take to be more or less the kind of schematic interplay the two would have had in creating the film. The film's uncredited co-star is that '76 VW bus, painted a cloudy gray, which Phillips bought off Craigslist (the seller came to SIFF to see his former car on the big screen). Its midsection cut out, it beetles along the freeway being passed by semi after semi, breaking down, running out of gas, and prompting explosions from Phillips.

Cinematographer Sean Porter ended up using his camera in lieu of calling "Action!" Since the camera fan turns off when it's shooting, that was the way he communicated to Linas, while they were on the road, that they were creating a movie in that moment. The early part of the trip is Phillips alone in the van, against vast and lonely Western landscapes, his only interactions with hotel clerks.

The film's biggest stumble (for me, at least) comes with the arrival of a buddy for Phillips, who is shoehorned into the movie without clear explanation.

"I knew there was going to be a buddy character. Originally it was going to be one guy, but then he couldn't do it, and I called my friend Jim [Fletcher] and he was able to fly out and meet us for a few days," explained Phillips. "But we didn't know what was going to happen between them. It was more going on feeling, and heavy on the mood. We just had faith it would get us somewhere if we kept doing things that kept feeling right." 

Fletcher is engaging enough, and the small on-the-road moments between him and Phillips are of a piece with the delights of the rest of the film. But he's yanked away and reappears without much concern for credibility. Perhaps because his character requires more continuity but is born of improvisation, he has an opaque, untrustworthy quality that doesn't sit easily with either buddyhood or fatherhood.

"It ended up being a little more serious than I originally thought," said Phillips of the film (though there's plenty of humor as well). He and Davie-Blue started discussing how the film keeps making references to childhood, parenthood, and relationships, which Phillips didn't consciously sit down to do. He let his acting choices take the wheel, in a way.

"I was like...there's something about his dad, he's going back to Boston, I realized, there's shame and wanting to live up to something," he said, and Davie-Blue commented then on how the conflicted role of withholding provider kept coming up, whether as mother or lover or alpaca feeder.

Thanks to editing, these moments reflect off one another, amplifying connections: Phillips is invited to stay the night at the home of an unemployed man ravaged by bitterness and embarrassment; he and a teenage-girl exchange illicit glances at a gas station; he hits on a girl with a boyfriend at a bar (the ensuing verbal beat-down is courtesy of the shoot's driver); he meets a father (Paul Lazar) who rocks the film with an outpouring of both curdled despair and indomitable warmth.

"Who's this film for?" I asked them. "Anyone who could benefit--" said Davie-Blue. "--from loving themselves a bit more," finished Phillips. "It is a dude's film, I think," added Davie-Blue. It's already available for purchase.